Environment Ontology

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"The Environment Ontology (EnvO) provides a controlled, structured vocabulary that is designed to support the annotation of any organism or biological sample with environment descriptors. EnvO contains terms for biomes, environmental features, and environmental material." EnvO enables "a concise, standardised, and comprehensive description of environment that is key to the integration, archiving and federated searching of environmental data. As a tool for the life sciences, we see EnvO bringing benefits similar to those of the Gene Ontology (GO). Through promoting consistent annotation grounded in an ontological framework, we hope to facilitate the semantic retrieval of any biological record anchored to EnvO. Records contained in sequence databases, 'omic data repositories, tissue banks and museum collections are prime candidates for EnvO annotation. However, EnvO is also suitable for the annotation of any record that has an environmental component. For example, you can use EnvO terms to provide information on the environment of remote sensing devices or simply to tag a picture that you took at the weekend. Further, the EnvO project is closely tied with GAZ, a first step towards an open source gazetteer constructed on ontological principles. GAZ describes places and place names as well as the relations between them and, when linked with EnvO descriptors, provides a basis to infer environment from place names."